On Saturday, January 3, 1857, the Archbishop of Paris Marie-Dominique-Auguste Sibour had just reached the church of Saint-Etienne-du-Mont when Jean-Loiuis Verger stepped out of a crowd — out of obscurity — and plunged a long Catalan knife fatally into Sibour’s chest.

The assassin Verger (English Wikipedia entry | French) was a 30-year-old ordained priest who had accumulated a quarrelsome reputation among his ecclesiastical peers. The previous year, he had been laid under an official interdiction for preaching against the Catholic Church’s controversial new doctrine of the Virgin Mary’s Immaculate Conception.

Some reports had Verger crying out “No goddesses!” as he daggered the archbishop. “It is nowise the person of the Archbishop of Paris whom I wished to strike, but, in his person, the dogma of the Immaculate Conception,” Verger told the magistrates who judged him within days. There wasn’t a whole lot of doubt about the trial, so why wait around? But Verger’s vendetta wasn’t only theological; his suspension meant he wasn’t getting paid, and as his fury mounted over it he went so far as to post himself at the door of a church with a placard proclaiming that he was starving.

Archbishop of Paris was a surprisingly dangerous job in the mid-19th century. Sibour got the post because his predecessor was shot dead negotiating at a barricade during the 1848 revolution; in 1871, Archbishop Georges Darboy was taken hostage by the Paris Commune and executed by his captors when the national government invaded the city.

On this day..

• 1953: Mat Indera, for the Bukit Kepong incident
• 1945: Andrew Brown, Leading Aircraftsman
• 1937: Georgy Pyatakov, Anti-Soviet Parallel Trotskyist
• 1944: The Homfreyganj massacre of the Andaman Islands
• 1744: Skinnar Per Andersson, legislator
• 1801: Four entrapped Jacobins
• 1913: John Williams, the Case of the Hooded Man
• 2011: Ahmed Ali Hussein, enemy cleric
• 1474: Not the Archer of Meudon
• 1996: William Flamer, Alito'd
• 1661: Oliver Cromwell, posthumously
• 1649: Charles I